In the upcoming years the Municipality of Amsterdam has to cope with renovation works to approximately 200 kilometers of quay walls and 800 bridges. These projects need to be executed in the least burdensome manner, which is why executing parties are obliged to perform their construction logistics via waterways instead of the road. Stakeholders want to have more insight into the consequences of using waterborne construction logistics and what the possible choices and decisions are within the system. In this research a waterborne construction logistics system is presented from which waterborne scenarios can both be compared with each other and with the conventional road modality. A decision support tool is developed and used to quantify these consequences and it can be concluded that water is always the preferred alternative when looking at movements and vessel/vehicle kilometers through the city, which is for both indicators a decrease of approximately 80%. From this analysis can be concluded that in the most optimistic scenario it is possible for waterborne logistics to become less expensive than road transport, but under the conditions that the average transported load and vessel speed are rather high. It is therefore recommended to further investigate the optimum between vessel capacity, loading rate and vessel speed and for the Municipality of Amsterdam to involve executing stakeholders to contribute to reaching this optimum.

Due to a global increase in food consumption and shipping, and regional developments like exploitation of the Vaca Muerta oil field, the port of Bahía Blanca in Argentina sees an opportunity to increase its activities. Therefore, a new container terminal will be constructed in the port of Bahía Blanca that can handle 500,000 TEU per year. This terminal is expected to be competitive to the container terminals in the port of Buenos Aires, which currently are Argentina’s market leaders in container handling. In addition, a shorter entry channel and deeper draft makes the port of Bahía Blanca more attractive than the port of Buenos Aires. Currently, it is unknown whether an increase in container throughput can be attracted from industries in the province of Buenos Aires. This province extends from Buenos Aires to Bahía Blanca, 650 km south of Buenos Aires. Next to that, it followed from qualitative interview sessions that all freight transport in the province is done by truck. As a result, roads are heavily congested during harvest season and for this reason container transport by train is preferred. Other reasons for choosing train as transport modality are the competitive location within the rail network of the port of Bahía Blanca and sustainable character of rail transport.